United Kingdom local councils

UK Government and Local Councils use maps extensively across many areas of operation: planning department, highways department, refuse collection, etc, etc. For many years they have been compelled (by the "mapping services agreement") to license Ordnance Survey map products at great expense. The Ordnance Survey Opendata announcements will no doubt bring about some fundamental changes in the way this works, but even before that, some forward-looking local councils experimented with using other map providers particularly for public facing online web mapping.

OpenStreetMap offers some very interesting possibilities in this area, not just as a provider of raster maps, but as a platform for engaging with local communities for gathering detailed map data, and presenting it back to them in interesting and useful ways. Feel free to use this page to flesh out some ideas for how local councils can do this.

Government use of OpenStreetMap data

Tools / ideas / etc.

Providing local web developers with a platform - Government (perhaps even local government) could look at providing data APIs, tile services, widgets for local web developers. Much more do-able now all the data is open licensed. Also certain types of tools can be scaled easier for the limited area of a local council district (a very small area in OSM terms)

OpenStreetMap use of Government resources

How to avoid infringing copyrightThe United Kingdom mapping community supports the copyright guidance provided on the OpenStreetMap Copyright wiki page. If in doubt please ask in the talk-gb mailing list.

In the second half of the 2000s (decade), the Open Data movement grew increasingly loud. This led to the appointment of Sir Tim Berners Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt to oversee the release of data sets from various UK Government departments and the new data.gov.uk website. Many of these data sets are released under the new Open Government Licence, allowing royalty-free and commercial use of the data, including with OpenStreetMap.

This section discusses government data that may be of use within OpenStreetMap. It is split by data that has been released under a licence that is compatible with OpenStreetMap's licence and other data that is currently only available by request.

Data available for use in OpenStreetMap

The following government datasets have been released under licences that allow their use within OpenStreetMap:

NaPTAN - Public transport access points (including every bus stop) in Great Britain.

Other Government Data

This section discusses data that may of some use to mapping in the United Kingdom. It does not signify that the data can be used within OpenStreetMap and all mappers are advised to check OSM's copyright policy. If you would like to use any of this data, you would first need to write to the copyright holder (often your local council).

Lists of changes to highways/street naming notificationsLocal Councils notify interested parties on the council's decisions on naming and numbering new properties and streets. As the highway network has now been densely surveyed and mapped, it would be an invaluable list of places that might need re-surveying or other editing. Often this is released on each councils website in the form of a PDF file per decision, in a human readable format only. The exact format differs by council. Read more.

Definitive Statement & Definitive MapIn England and Wales each "surveying authority" is required to produce a statement (list) and map of public rights of way. Any path not on these documents by 2026 will no longer be a right of way. We are hoping to get some of these released under a compatible license so that we can help identify missing paths. See #List of UK Councils.

Statements currently only in paper form. But an electronic copy is (slowly) being worked on.

rjw62 requested statements and OGL use 2012-05-30. Only in paper form, so not practicable to provide us a copy.Using the ICO, on 2015-11-10 rjw62 managed to get a snapshot of Cambridgeshire PRoW data but "alas no sensible licence for reuse yet".

rjw62 requested statements and OGL use 2012-05-15. Statements in paper form only, so not practicable for them to provide a copy. They may be amenable to one of us going in person and making their our copy though.

Scans of the definitive statement for each path can be accessed through the PRoW map. We have permission to use the statements under the OGL. The RoW data provided through the WMS service can be used under OS OpenData licence.

rjw62 requested OGL use 2012-05-03. Now granted. RobJN received confirmation that the WMS service is available under the OS OpenData Licence (Aug 2012) [22].

OpenStreetMap Development Platform in general

The above ideas are more around end uses. There are some ideas we could work on before that though to make it easier to build end-use apps. These ideas are not really specific to UK councils, but considering council-sized areas of data presents some interesting possibilities.

Turn NOVAM into something that can be used to check any specified POI data, including imports

A useful (but optional) format simplification might be to convert POIs mapped as areas (e.g. schools) back to single nodes (centrepoints)

POI formats: GeoRSS, KML, GPX, Tabular CSV data.

Visualising XAPI-like results

Having built above features we'd want out-of-the box OpenLayers (or Mapstraction?) configs or at least sample code for easily hooking up to it and seeing the results. e.g. all school POIs as markers on a slippy map. Maybe take ideas from NaPTAN/Novam ([25])